In Thailand and Uzbekistan, colleges named for Shennong, the legendary father of Chinese agriculture, teach local students modern farming with roots in Chinese methods, and all of them were established by the same modest school in Tianjin. Tianjin Agricultural University also runs a Luban Workshop in Bulgaria, a full set of overseas classrooms for a university that serves the city’s own urban agriculture at home.
The university was founded in 1976, absorbed a municipal urban-rural economy school in 2001, and won master’s degree rights in 2006. It passed the national undergraduate teaching evaluation in 1996 and earned an excellent rating in the 2007 round. Three campuses cover 1,370 mu, about 91 hectares, serving 15,000 students across 14 colleges.
Fifty undergraduate programs span seven fields, led by two disciplines in the ESI top 1 percent, plant and animal science and agricultural science, with six national first-class programs and 17 rated first-class at municipal level. Ten first-level master’s programs and six professional master’s categories support the graduate side, and the school runs 24 national science and technology backyards, field stations where researchers live with farmers and solve problems on the spot.
Research follows the modern farm: a ministry-province key laboratory for smart livestock breeding leads 40 provincial-and-above platforms, and in the current five-year period the school has carried out 1,600-plus research projects, 500 of them at provincial level or above. Its rural revitalization training has earned national attention, ranking fourth among 42 institutions in a 2023 national evaluation of village-industry leader training.
Its 1,000-plus faculty include recipients of national talent programs and specialists in the national agricultural technology systems, and its graduates are known by employers for a quality the school lists with some pride: they stay. International ties reach 60-plus universities in 30-plus countries, from the Shennong colleges to a partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Tianjin Agricultural University has spent half a century serving the city’s farms and fields, and in recent years it has started serving farms much farther away: Shennong colleges in Thailand and Uzbekistan, a Luban Workshop in Bulgaria, and the quiet claim that a school from Tianjin now teaches agriculture on three continents.
Data Source: TJAU Official Website (as of 2026)
